Teen who wanted out of South Side gang was fatally shot at a memorial for a slain gang member

Luis Garcia was standing at a makeshift memorial for a slain friend Wednesday afternoon when he was fatally shot in the chest by a gunman more than a block away, Chicago police said.

Some residents call the 2900 block of East 87th Street -- where both shootings took place -- the "dead zone" because of all the violence that takes place there. It is a crossroads between three gangs: Latin Kings, Ambrose and Latin Dragons.

Garcia, 17, was trying to get out of the Latin Kings, but efforts by a community center last spring to find another high school in a different neighborhood failed because he had a criminal record and poor grades, center officials and his family said.

He was gunned down on his way home from Chicago Discovery Academy High School. The gunman fired from some 400 feet to the east on the same side of the street, police said.

Garcia was shot as he stood where Michael "Mickey" Vilella was killed five days earlier. Vilella's friends had erected a memorial of stuffed animals, beer bottles and a wooden cross there. Police identified Vilella as a Latin King as well.

Garcia's stepdad and sister acknowledged he joined the Latin Kings as a high school freshman, feeling he had little choice and that it made it safer for him in his South Chicago neighborhood.

"When he started high school at first, he would tell me he was afraid," said Maria Lopez, the boy's mother. "He said if you don't belong to a group, they'll beat you. You had to join in order to defend yourself."

But he felt trapped and wanted out, according to his family and the community center workers who tried to find another school for him.

"He was reaching out," said Marta Perea, the family literacy coordinator at Centro Comunitario Juan Diego. "It's sad these kids have to go through so much, and when they are asking for help, no one wants to help them. Once you have a record, you're dismissed."

Garcia walked through the center's doors in April to complete 100 hours of community service for an undisclosed juvenile conviction. Even after he finished the mandatory hours, he still came to the center to hang out, clean up and play on the computer.

Garcia, who was artistic, volunteered to paint a mural at the center but never followed through. When school started again in September, he stopped showing up.

His sister, Alondra Lopez, 13, said her brother was "scared but he'd never show it."

In the last couple of months, "rival gangbangers started looking for him. They'd park by the tree outside and sit there and wait," his sister said. "I'd call and tell him, 'They're outside,' so he wouldn't come home. And I'd worry about what (might) happen to him when I went to sleep."

Garcia's stepfather, Ignacio Lopez, was the disciplinarian in their house.

"If I was strict, my wife told me, 'You don't love him because he's not yours.' So I gave up on disciplining him," he said. "I felt like my hands were tied."

Garcia's mother said she was attentive and could talk about anything with her son. She wished she had time to drive him to and from school, but her long hours as a restaurant cashier made that impossible.

"I tried to give him everything he wanted to entice him away from the streets," she said. "Many times people blame the parents, thinking we don't know how to raise them. They don't know what we do for them."